Zephyr

Managing globally distributed testing teams

The world of testing has dramatically changed in the past 5 years. A new approach to testing software that takes significant tasks of the testing lifecycle and "outsources" them to an external team specializing in certain types of testing, an industry domain or particular tools. A large number of such specialist companies offering test services to remote customers have sprung up in India, China, Brazil, Phillippines, and Eastern Europe, among others.

These companies provide significant value by offering well trained testing resources, at a lower price point and longer testing windows due to time-zone advantages (i.e. a "follow-the-sun" testing process). Small, medium, and large companies alike are now using this model and reaping great benefits in increased quality and coverage, lower TCO, and faster time-to-market.

Determining the effectiveness of these outsourced projects is difficult. There are many challenges that can negate the benefits of test outsourcing. We now examine a few of the major challenges faced by such geographically distributed test teams and outline how they can be overcome using Zephyr.

• Visibility
• Time zone
• Language barriers
• Productivity metrics
• Organization of test assets
• Cost of licenses

Visibility

Visibility is one of the major challenges that testing teams face as they outsource portions of their testing to an outsourced testing - their productivity, the status of their tasks, their test execution status and issues they have encountered. Workarounds and processes put in are often manual workarounds with additional burden put on detailed status reporting, long late-night and early-morning conference calls, and multiple layers of expensive governance. Zephyr's push based real time updates allows managers at corporate locations to make changes to priorities and tasks, and have them immediately visible on the testers' desktops. There is never a need to refresh a screen which means no one can say, "I didn't see the change".

Time Zone

Time zone differences and language barriers make doing business with outsourced vendors challenging. At time, this forces teams to have long conference calls at the very beginning part of the day or late at night after a full days' work. These meetings are used to assign tasks, reprioritize efforts and collect metrics. Much of the communication is handled via email since differences in languages and accents can make understanding one another difficult. In some instances, the testers are not communicating with the business, rather there is a delivery manager who handles internal communication at the outsourced provider and is the single point of contact for the business.

Productivity metrics

Productivity metrics are a critical part of any outsourced testing initiative. Most times, reports are provided by request or on a daily basis, which is not good enough. Metrics for individual productivity and project quality need to be provided in real time so that important decisions can be made with accurate and up to date information. Not having real time data, could impact critical go/no go decisions. In addition to automatically gathering and presenting quality and productivity metrics, information is assembled into easy-to-understand executive dashboards that are web accessible. Since every change is immediately pushed to the individual testers' desktops and the project and department level dashboards, leads, managers, and directors find themselves in the know, reducing the need to have many conference calls early and late in the day.

Organization of test assets

Most test management tools have a single repository, which over time becomes a massive, ineffective way to manage test assets. Finding specific information or individual test cases takes countless hours over the course of a project. Teams are not able to reuse their efforts and must reinvent the wheel each time costing valuable time. Finally, as more data is put into the system with manual testing processes or with automation activities, the performance of system degrades.

Cost of licenses

Managing an outsourced testing team has its expenses. While money is saved on the cost of labor, licensing legacy software is expensive. Legacy software providers have complex licensing models that include physical locations, expensive regional areas and very expensive unrestricted global licenses. Zephyr offers very simple, affordable global licenses for the same price.

Summary

Welcome to innovative test management from Zephyr. Zephyr has been built with the latest and greatest technologies to manage all aspects of the testing lifecycle, and integrate various test tools, processes, and systems. It provides global access, collaboration, and management visibility. Zephyr is accessible from anywhere using any web browser on any operating system. Please contact us by phone or request a meeting to learn more about our solutions.